Things have been bad enough over the past couple of years since Covid escaped from a lab in China. Now, the world is learning that a Japanese demon is loose. Tamamo-no-Mae was released from her volcanic rock prison.
Beware the escaped demon
In Japan, since around 1123, they called it the “killing stone.” Inside for centuries was rumored to be “evil demon that will kill anyone who comes into contact with it.” Locals made a fortune off of it with tourists.
Recently, someone discovered the famous piece of volcanic rock, called the “Sessho-seki” has “split in two, sending superstitious believers into a state of panic.” Great. An ancient, evil being on the loose. Just what we needed.
Peacefully nestled in “the mountainous region of Tochigi, north of Tokyo,” the trapped demon has been a focal point for the entire local economy as long as anyone can remember.
Visitors were totally shocked over the weekend, The Guardian reported Monday, March 7, “when they found it separated into two roughly similar sized parts.”
Named Sessho-seki, the chunk of volcanic basalt, legend warns, “contains the transformed corpse of Tamamo-no-Mae, a beautiful woman whose true identity was said to have been an evil nine-tailed fox.”
The demon supposedly “was part of a plot to kill Emperor Toba who ruled Japan from 1107 to 1123.”
Embedded in stone
The fable relates that powerful sorcery was used which embedded the evil spirit into the stone. But, that didn’t neutralize it. The demon would still “kill anyone who came into contact with it.” They put up a post warning of the “killing stone” and started selling tickets. Today, they’re terrified.
Scientists take all the fun out of it by claiming “the stone is likely to have split in half after rainwater seeped into cracks which first appeared several years ago, causing it to break.”
Since the stone split, the demon did too. That means the tourists and all their money will disappear along with it. Who wants to go see the empty prison cell when the main attraction took a powder? Alternate versions of the legend say things might not be as bad as they seem.
Some claim a “Buddhist monk exorcised the spirit” from the rock “before scattering it across Japan.” Locals didn’t like that version because it cut into their ticket sales. Masaharu Sugawara, who leads a local volunteer guide group, told Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun “the split was a ‘shame‘ because it was a popular tourist attraction for the area.”
Those tending the site for generations say “it was always located on the slopes of Mount Nasu and that its evil spirit may have been resurrected, releasing a poisonous gas.” Two unhappy tourists had to break the news to them. “I feel like I’ve seen something that shouldn’t be seen,” one noted.
Another “feared the release of an evil demon was just the latest horror of 2022.” Responses on social media include an observation that “the spirit would want to spend another millennium stuck inside the rock after looking at the current state of the world.“
